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Archive for July 21, 2008

Shock Bracelet Considered For Airline Passengers, Border Control

(InfoWeek, 7/8/08)In order to enhance the security of air travel and to help manage illegal immigration, the Department of Homeland Security has solicited a proposal from a Canadian security company to develop a passenger stun bracelet. Like the pain collars featured in the classic Star Trek episode The Gamesters of Triskelion, Lamperd Less Lethal’s electro-muscular disruption (EMD) bracelet is intended to incapacitate wearers on remote command.

A video at the Lampred Less Lethal Web site explains that the bracelet will obviate the need for a plane ticket and will help make passengers and baggage trackable while traveling. It also explains that the bracelet will provide in-flight security. “By further equipping the bracelet with EMD technology, the bracelets will allow crew members, using radio frequency transmitters, to quickly and effective subdue hijackers,” the video explains. “The electro-muscular disruption signal overrides the attacker’s central nervous system and will render even the most elite and aggressive terrorist completely immobile for several minutes.”

http://www.informationweek.com/news/security/intrusion_prevention/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=208803214

The Spy in the Lab

 (Forbes.com, 7/17/08)

U.S. companies need to be increasingly careful about what they tell their Chinese engineers.Last August J. Reece Roth, an electrical engineering professor at the University of Tennessee, passed along a research paper to Sirous Nourgostar, a graduate student from Iran working under his supervision. It contained details on refined plasma actuator technology, which uses ionized gas to improve aircraft control. Roth was doing research on flight performance for a U.S. Air Force contractor and had relied on the assistance of Nourgostar and of Xin Dai, a Chinese national also studying under him.

That turned out to be a bad idea. In May Roth and the penny stock company he was working for were indicted by the federal government for violating an export control law that carries a maximum jail term of ten years. Roth’s business partner, Daniel Sherman, pleaded guilty and fingered Roth for giving Dai restricted data. Roth, who pleaded not guilty, got entangled in a little-known area of export law that is alarming big business and scientific researchers. It covers transfers of controlled technological information to foreigners on U.S. soil. The transfers are considered exports because they are “deemed” to be going to the country where the recipient is a citizen.

http://www.forbes.com/global/2008/0721/042.html

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